Ron Johnson alleges "dubious premises"

Here's Fox News/Republican/Tea candidate Ron Johnson's latest Fisk-begging statement to the press:

This [federal] grant was secured in March of 1979 by Wisconsin Industrial Shipping Supplies ...

WKOW's report mentioned that, so it's not dubious, it's affirmed.

... in exchange for a substantial business investment for the City of Oshkosh.

"For" the City of Oshkosh. Clever.

But that's generally the way these things work, isn't it? The federal grant to build a spur from the (Canadian-owned) Soo Line is on the larger view an investment in the local economy, based on a presumption that the grantee will prosper and her prosperity will in turn attract more business to the community. Econ 101, I reckon.

And Ron Johnson is coming dangerously close to suggesting the rail spur was somehow a burden on his business, an act of purest civic martyrdom, a sacrifice he endured "for" the City of Oshkosh. Absurd.

A rail siding is a great benefit to a shipper especially. You can fit more stuff on a rail car, and it's cheaper than trucking.* Plus you don't have to warehouse the finished product, you just stick it on the rail car and keep filling it up the next shift. There's nothing like a rail siding run right into your building, particularly a free gummint one.

You know what this rail siding is? Stimulus, which Ron Johnson rails against, and is currently spending much of his life attacking Russ Feingold for supporting similar initiatives all over the country and especially in Wisconsin. So how come it's good for Ron Johnson but it's an assault on Ron Johnson's Freedoms when it's for anybody else?

Ron Johnson moved to Wisconsin in June of 1979 and started Pacur, which has become a true Wisconsin success story.

Nobody, I expect, disputes the latter, although it is less of a premise than a conclusion with at least one missing premise. Dubious.

Gummint

Yet first Ron Johnson affirms he signed on only a couple of months after the grant was "secured" — it's not clear which moment in the procedure that refers to; it might be any one of several — whereas WKOW had simply said "months." Where's the "dubious premise" there; I don't see it. One could easily have read it as October.

You can take a look at the rail spur on teh Google maps. If it was "secured" in March, it sure wasn't completed by June. They had 12 months to build it and if Ron Johnson is so adamantly opposed to these sort of government handouts, then he should have stopped it, as he was in control of his company since "day one" In June, 1979.

But of course he didn't stop it. It's a pretty sweet deal. And there seems little question the rail siding benefited Johnson's company financially. That's likely even quantifiable, but we can leave that exercise to Ron Johnson, as he's the one with the accounting degree.

Nonetheless, these allegations from WKOW are based entirely on dubious premises.

All premissary dubiousness is to Johnson's account. He is the one yelling at Tea Parties — 'Leave us conservatives alone!' — and elsewhere about the evil gummint and now here he is running a business with a free rail siding, courtesy the federal government.

And $4M in state-facilitated loans at up to 2-1/2 points below market interest rates. Why shouldn't somebody else accrue such benefits similarly? That's the question Ron Johnson needs to answer now.

Randian

If your own premises are that government grants and subsidies to business are unwanted and unneeded and indeed, a malicious affront to the hallowed Randian dystopia, then you render those premises dubious when you lobby for and accept so much of them.

How is that not outright hypocrisy, or outright lying,** given Ron Johnson's prior claims about subsidies and stimulus packages?

We have highways, railroads, post offices, water and electrical services among other public services that businesses rely on each day.

Now he sounds like a liberal defending Feingold's vote on the stimulus package. Who knows what Ron Johnson will come up with tomorrow.

It's not any "dubious premises" Ron Johnson objects to, it's the fact that he got himself rather amusingly busted by inquisitive reporters.

Again.

In the meantime, where is Dave Westlake? Westlake has economic principles too, but he doesn't appear to have betrayed any of them. Republican primary voters, who go to the polls here in about two weeks, should take another look at him, as I understand they're in the market for someone who can actually beat Feingold in November.

* More so when you've got your own rail siding.

** Not to worry. It's most likely protected political speech in Wisconsin (pending a successful motion for summary judgment).

eta: More observations from the always astute Chief of Oshkosh.
[Welcome WisOpinion readers. They won't link to him but I will.]

Ron Johnson challenges professor of economics*

"They're out to destroy me." — Ron Johnson

Item: "A Republican senatorial candidate said the government should stop distributing the funds and return the money to the treasury."

Him first.

"The $75,000 rail spur happened before I was even on the scene, and industrial revenue bonds are not government subsidies," Johnson told the group of about 50 people who gathered in the lower level of Four Star Family Restaurant.

No informed person said the bond itself was a subsidy. The subsidy inheres from obtaining the favorable interest rate:

"Tax-free bonds allow a borrower to borrow at a lower rate," said Andrew Reschovsky,** a professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "That's a subsidy from normal borrowing."

And there's no way that rail spur was built within two months of its being "secured." But that isn't the point. The point is that Johnson was for a mixed economy before he was against it. Johnson is preaching Randian dog-eat-dog ("creative destruction") capitalism yet his own business prospered through government largesse.

It's no surprise Johnson is having a hard time admitting it.

"Certainly, the negativity is not on my part," he said, noting he only counters what he called misleading reports from Democrats and news media. "They're out to destroy me."

Oh stop it. All they're doing is actually listening to what Ron Johnson has been saying and then comparing it with the observable reality.

Those results are often strongly discordant.

* I was kind of hoping he'd get in touch with Martin Sharp.

** "[Prof. Reschovsky's] research focuses on tax policy and intergovernmental fiscal relations."

— La Follette School of Public Affairs

I think he would know what constitutes a subsidy in this context.

Wisconsin Republicans may hate trains

But they sure do love their free rail sidings:

Walker announced Thursday afternoon that the State would award Waukesha-based Weldall Manufacturing a $650,000 grant through the State Department of Transportation to help cover half the cost of extending a rail line to its facility.

You know who else loved free rail sidings? Ron Johnson is who.

Ron Johnson never complained about his free gummint rail spur.

A Milwaukee paper's Bizarro World PolitiFact®

So the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's PolitiFact® team has today stepped into the fray over Russ Feingold's teevee ad, "His Own Words."

The ad contrasts Fox News/Republican candidate Ron Johnson's alleged freewheeling Randian marketeer persona with whether Johnson's Oshkosh plastics company, Pacur, ever got a leg up by dint of federal/State/municipal intervention in the economy.

The "His [Ron Johnson's] Own Words" bit is this:

"I have never lobbied for some special treatment or for a government, government payment."

— said Ron Johnson, emphasis his.

The J-S first complains that Johnson was taken out of context:

For instance, the ad creates the false impression Johnson is responding directly to revelations that his business got government help. The question he was answering was whether a Milwaukee-area company deserved tax credits touted by President Obama.

And ... so what of it? When a speaker speaks, "I have never [X]," what difference does the context make? It is the negation of an existential quantifier, as they say in predicate logic: "It is not the case that there was lobbying for special treatment."

All the context in the world can't rescue the statement. It's unequivocal, no matter what inquiry it was in response to.

The J-S is rather bold in its evaluation of the ad's presentation:

There is no question the ad is misleading in its presentation.

But obviously there are plenty of questions, otherwise the J-S wouldn't be performing its review. There are always questions.

Isn't every ad "misleading" to some extent in its presentation? Of course every ad is, because there is necessarily always some missing context. There has to be. Thirty-second advertisements can't possibly deliver the entire universe of potentially relevant information.

The pertinent question is whether the ad is deliberately misleading in its presentation. One may be of that opinion, but there are always a variety of defenses available. WKOW-27 in Madison, which was the source for some of the film clips in the ad, similarly complained.

But that was more WKOW's problem than anyone else's. The Feingold ad is merely presenting the press accounts. All candidates do this, based on the premise that press reports are credibly accurate.

Look at any political candidate's website for myriad examples.

Sure, that may be a dubious premise, but the press is supposedly the professionally trained reporter of facts (notwithstanding the existence of, for example, the Journal-Sentinel's own Patrick McIlheran, who could do with his own PolitiFact® inspection, although in that case the team would be unlikely to get any other work done).

WKOW asked Feingold to "take down the ad," but even WKOW's own counsel acknowledged that the Feingold campaign was within federal copyright law's fair use doctrine. So that was a bit self-defeating.

WKOW never admitted that perhaps it was its own reporting that might have been misleading. Maybe that is the problem here.

As to the gist of the ad, however, it's the J-S that's misleading:

When it comes to describing Johnson's company as getting "government aid," the Feingold ad is correct. Independent experts and the federal government itself label the industrial revenue bonds a government subsidy. So the message about Pacur getting government help is on target.

We've been through this weeks ago,* so it's nice to see the paper finally catching up to a blog. Okay. Now, how about the rail spur?

The $75,000 grant is clearly government aid. And the rail line it helped create clearly has helped Pacur from its earliest days.

Those are the two main items under consideration: The $4M worth of government-facilitated and government-administered industrial revenue bonds which saved Johnson's company hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments and the $75,000 grant. And what is the Journal-Sentinel's PolitiFact® conclusion about Feingold's ad?

We rate the statement about government aid Half True.

So the industrial revenue bonds, which Johnson's company got, are government aid. Check: True. And the $75,000 grant is "clearly" government aid. Check: True. Thus, that makes Feingold's statement about Johnson's company getting government aid "Half True"?

Say wha? There are only the two propositions to substantiate. And the PolitiFact® team just got done substantiating both of them.

Which half of them is not true? Even if one accepts that the ad is "misleading" in some way — as any ad is bound to be — how does that detract from the veracity of its core assertions, that Johnson's company benefited from government aid in spite of his "principles"?

If the PolitiFact® mandate is to clear away confusion, it's failed here.

* See, e.g., Ron Johnson: It's not a subsidy; Ron Johnson challenges professor of economics; Dick Leinenkugel's guide to industrial bonds; Feingold has a built-in attorney at WKOW; et peter cetera.

By and with the Advice and Consent of Ron Johnson

Senate candidate Ron Johnson maturing quickly

— Wisconsin State Journal, 08/01/10

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Craig Gilbert has more on Ron Johnson's intransigence. In a nutshell, Johnson wants to undo literally two years of work by the Wisconsin Federal Nominating Commission, and is moaning because he can't pick four instead of three members to the 12-member Commission. One minute Ron Johnson is saying nobody knows who Victoria Nourse is, and the next he's calling her "extreme."

The current vacancy became effective on January 7, 2010, one year before Johnson became a Senator. The entire process devoted to filling the vacancy took place while Johnson was still shipping plastic from his federally funded rail spur and extolling the economic virtues of China.

Johnson campaigned on promises to cut government spending. Now he wants to waste another two years reviewing applicants for a position that became a judicial emergency on July 7 due to the number of case filings that have accumulated with the Seventh Circuit in the meantime.

The Federal Nominating Commission as constituted prior to Johnson's arrival in the Senate consisted of four members each chosen by Sen. Herb Kohl and former Sen. Russ Feingold, two chosen by the State Bar, and the deans of the University of Wisconsin and Marquette University law schools. Now Johnson tells the MJS he wants a re-do, and he wants to pick the four members in place of those chosen by Sen. Feingold.

Eleven applications to the vacancy were received by September, 2009, and two months later, six of those were presented to Obama. From those six, Obama selected Prof. Nourse. Apparently Ron Johnson wants us to believe that if he got to pick four members of the Commission, then the six prospective judges presented to Obama would be different, or else Obama would have selected a prospective judge more in keeping with Ron Johnson's comically harebrained views of the judiciary.*

Either of which scenario is nonsense, obviously. In fact if Obama had a sense of humor, he'd nominate Ron Johnson to the Seventh Circuit.

What Johnson is pulling is obstruction, pure and simple. He's crying like a baby because a vacancy on the court was announced, prospective candidates were solicited and reviewed by a committee of competent professionals, their recommendations were forwarded to the president, and the president made his nomination, all before Ron Johnson even arrived on the scene. Now Johnson wants to put it off until July, 2013.

And at the moment, Ron Johnson unilaterally will not even allow Prof. Nourse a hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, a hearing from which Johnson could clearly stand to learn a great deal, including about the qualifications of the nominee, who Johnson declares either unknown or extreme, depending upon which day you ask him.

The Seventh Circuit presides over Illinois and Indiana as well, so those folks can also thank Sen. Ron Johnson for his pointless recalcitrance.

The Wisconsin seat Johnson is presenting them is his Wisconsin backside.

* With which Ron Johnson recently hired former MJS right-wing calumnist Patrick McIlheran — whose own views of the judiciary are not only equally harebrained but downright dishonest — to assist him.